Measuring Nonwhiteness, Remembering Toni Morrison and Nina Simone in an Age of Erasure
What does it mean when a mother of three can be shot down in broad daylight by a federal agent meant to protect communities? Renée Good was a poet. She was white and she was an American citizen. Even if the first attribute could be construed as a threat, in the larger American imagination, the latter two should have functioned as guarantees. They should have insulated her from harm. But they did not.
Good’s killing compels a more rigorous question: what is being guaranteed, and for whose protection does that guarantee exist? As the sociologist Saida Grundy reminds us, the promise to safeguard white women in America has never been unconditional. It is honoured only so long as it serves the structure that sustains it, a structure that is at once patriarchal and white. When that order is threatened, the promise is broken. The alliance between white womanhood and white supremacy, we are reminded, is an arrangement. And arrangements, as we now see, may be withdrawn.
Nonwhiteness and the Machinery of Power
Power may solicit criticism, even stage it as proof of its own openness, but it does not endure it unconditionally. After Good’s murder, the state moved quickly to defend itself. Both the Department of Justice and Homeland Security framed the incident as necessary and inevitable. But some voices intervened. Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar refused the state’s narrative, while the Minneapolis mayor, Jacob Frey, rejected the official script. Their outrage unsettled the serene vocabulary of compliance, and the state’s inhumanity stood exposed. By now, however, inhumanity has become a familiar refrain.
Only a few days earlier, in an ICE facility in Baltimore, U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin saw non-white detainees crowded into holding rooms in the most demeaning of conditions. The account was shocking because it was conceivable within the state’s logic of governance. Dignity is elusive in a system that reduces non-whites into units to be managed.
Cornel West called this the “niggerisation” of America. In the United States, the Black body has long functioned as the site upon which discipline is practised and paraded. However, the Black female body bears an additional weight, racialised and gendered at once, exposed to scrutiny, repression, and erasure.
The Birthdays of Two Titans
Both Nina Simone (February 18) and Toni Morrison (February 21) were born this month. In simpler times, that fact might have invited a conventional tribute. Now it asks for something more exacting. Both were women. Both Black. Both of them knew what dehumanisation in America entailed. And for that, their works insist on a more precise form of remembrance.
Nina Simone: Confronting the Nation in Public
In 1978, decades before ICE, Nina Simone sang of Baltimore. Her lyrics traced the weariness of a place where dignity was in shambles. To Simone, Baltimore was no longer a city in Maryland, but an index of exhaustion, a signifier of the human condition, a refrain. She listed the routine fatigue of a city, and the slow unravelling of the American dream.
The song was political, but without the blunt force of “Mississippi Goddam” (1964). The latter marked Simone’s first unequivocal protest, written in the aftermath of the September 1963 bombing in Birmingham, when a white supremacist’s attack killed four young Black girls. Racial violence was the theme, and Simone’s performance bore its weight.
Two years later, in 1966, in her “Four Women,” the crisis consuming Black women appeared with an undeniable immediacy. Race, gender, and historical trauma converged, accumulating and settling into lived experience. The dehumanisation of the Black woman was, Simone bemoaned, unrelenting.
“Baltimore” does not carry the force of conviction that we discern in other songs. Simone’s words are soft without being indulgent. She did not deny the racial discrimination and economic decline that marked the city. It showed in its streets, in the fatigue of its people. But Simone did not abandon the city to its failures. She looks at the city as it is, and attends to what is there. The song becomes an act of attention. It is an admission of love for a place, and for the idea of a place, which others have already written off.
Toni Morrison: Confronting the Nation in the Intimate Spaces of Home
Where Nina Simone confronts the nation in public, Toni Morrison confronts it in the intimate spaces of the home. The body becomes her stage. It thinks, and it remembers.
In The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (2019), Morrison maintained that racism works by taking away Black people’s inner life. In Beloved (1987), she worked to restore it. In it, the enslaved are no longer reduced to symbols of suffering. They think. They desire. They exercise the will to choose, and sometimes their choices are extreme.
Morrison’s protagonist, Sethe, embodies this fierce humanity. Her grisly act is not presented as pathology but as an excruciating decision forced by a world that treated her children as property. Such choices, Sethe soon realises, are accompanied by moral burden.
Memory restores interiority, and with it, dignity. The body remembers, Morrison reminds us. It thinks, and it carries history in every scar. Sethe had to remember her crime, because murder, Morrison reiterates, is a crime. Yet through memory, through the difficult reclamation of what was done and why, she is rendered human again. The woman on whom the story is based was never granted that reckoning. It is a privilege Morrison crafts into her fiction.
The Fictions We Live By
Now, in America, fiction contends with fiction. Once, slavery required the fiction that the Black body was property. Our present requires a different fiction: that some bodies are threats to order, contaminants of the nation’s imagined purity. Before a body can be caged, it must first be stripped of its humanity, its memories. For memories disturb the neat categories imposed upon them.
In our own moment, the categories have new names. Detainee. Alien. Words that perform erasure. Words that reduce human beings to administrative problems, to units to be managed, to threats to be neutralised.
When Good was murdered, her body was enveloped in a language that was procedural. But perhaps we should remind ourselves that a body does not die procedurally. It dies as a body. It dies as someone who thought, remembered, feared, hoped.
The Work of Art in an Age of Erasure
What Simone and Morrison understood, each in her own way, is that art can resist this erasure. Art can restore interiority. It can insist on the humanity of those the state would reduce to categories. It can remember what the state would forget.
Simone’s songs give voice to exhaustion and rage, but also to love for a place that has failed its people. Morrison’s novels give interiority to those history has rendered silent. Both insist that Black lives are not just data points or problems to be managed, but lives rich with thought, memory, and desire.
Conclusion: The Work of Remembrance
In an age when the machinery of the state continues to grind down those it deems other, the work of Simone and Morrison is more urgent than ever. They remind us that before a body can be caged, it must first be stripped of its humanity. They remind us that art can resist that stripping. They remind us that memory is a form of resistance.
To remember Simone and Morrison is not just to honour two great artists. It is to insist that the lives they wrote about and sang about matter. It is to refuse the language of procedure and category. It is to see, in every detainee, every alien, every body marked as other, a human being who thinks, remembers, fears, and hopes.
Q&A: Unpacking the Legacies of Morrison and Simone
Q1: How does the article connect the murder of Renée Good to larger questions about race and protection in America?
Good’s murder by a federal agent raises the question of what is being guaranteed and for whom. Despite being a white American citizen, she was not protected. Sociologist Saida Grundy argues that the promise to safeguard white women is conditional—honoured only when it serves the patriarchal white structure. When that order is threatened, the promise is broken. The alliance between white womanhood and white supremacy is an arrangement that can be withdrawn.
Q2: What does Cornel West mean by the “niggerisation” of America?
The term refers to the systematic reduction of non-white bodies into units to be managed, disciplined, and paraded. The Black body functions as the site upon which state power practises its authority. The Black female body bears an additional weight, racialised and gendered at once, exposed to scrutiny, repression, and erasure. This is evident in conditions at ICE facilities and in the state’s response to killings like Good’s.
Q3: How does Nina Simone’s “Baltimore” differ from her more overtly political songs?
“Baltimore” is softer without being indulgent. It does not deny the city’s racial discrimination and economic decline but looks at it as it is, attending to what is there. The song becomes an act of attention, an admission of love for a place others have written off. Unlike “Mississippi Goddam” or “Four Women,” which carry the force of unequivocal protest, “Baltimore” expresses weariness and a refusal to abandon the city to its failures.
Q4: How does Toni Morrison restore interiority to Black lives in her work?
In Beloved and her essays, Morrison resists the reduction of Black people to symbols of suffering. Her characters think, desire, and make choices—even extreme ones. Sethe’s infanticide is not presented as pathology but as an excruciating decision forced by a world that treated her children as property. Memory restores interiority and dignity; the body remembers and carries history in every scar. Morrison insists that Black lives have inner lives that matter.
Q5: What is the role of art in resisting contemporary forms of erasure?
Art can resist the fictions that justify state violence. Once, slavery required the fiction that the Black body was property. Today, the fiction is that some bodies are threats to order—detainees, aliens. Before a body can be caged, it must be stripped of its humanity and memories. Simone’s songs and Morrison’s novels restore that humanity, insisting on thought, memory, and desire. They refuse the language of procedure and category, seeing the human beneath.
